A study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia was released this week, and it has some sobering news for Bernie Sanders and his legions of millennial supporters. According to the study, it would cost the American taxpayers no less than $32.6 trillion over ten years to implement the socialist’s “Medicare for all” healthcare plan.
The libertarian institute found that while such a program would lower costs on prescription drugs and administrative programs, an increased demand for care would send costs soaring into the stratosphere. Not even doubling the corporate tax rate and doubling the highest tax bracket for individuals would come close to paying for the program.
“Enacting something like Medicare For All would be a transformative change in the size of the federal government,” said the study’s author, Charles Blahous.
Sanders, instead of addressing the specifics of the study, went for the low blow and accused the Mercatus Center of being a Koch-funded institute for billionaire interests.
“If every major country on earth can guarantee health care to all, and achiever better health outcomes while spending substantially less per capita than we do, it is absurd for anyone to suggest that the United States cannot do the same,” he said in a statement. “This grossly misleading and biased report is the Koch brothers’ response to the growing support in our country for a ‘Medicare for all’ program.”
Sanders estimates that the program would only cost…oh wait, his office has not performed a cost analysis, so he has no idea. How very interesting. How very unsurprising.
As for Sanders’ claim that other major countries provide single-payer healthcare to their citizens, that’s true enough. But the success of those initiatives has been overblown, to put it mildly. Taxes in the UK and Canada are through the roof. Individuals in these systems do not have the slightest control over where they get their healthcare or what procedures they may elect to have. And that’s not even getting into catastrophic cases like that of Charlie Gard, in which the state decided that the parents could not determine what was best for their infant baby. In these countries, patients facing their mortality – or that of their children – do not enjoy the “right to try.”
Furthermore, it cannot be overstated how much these systems benefit from a free market healthcare system like the one we have here in the United States. Much like Europe can afford not to spend a lot on their defense because the U.S. has their backs, they can afford to give their citizens free healthcare because the United States will come up with the latest scientific innovations. Once the U.S. falls to this kind of socialism, the planet as a whole will suffer due to an immediate halt in technological progress.
Like most of what comes out of the political left in this country, Medicare For All sounds like a terrific idea…right up to the point that you learn something about it.
